“If we can create portraits of subjects that are true, we thereby in effect create a mirror of the times,” said the German photographer August Sander. As happens today, corporations in the early 20th-century commissioned artists to take commercial images. Individuals such as Sander, Paul Outebridge, and Piet Zwart used the camera to transform banal objects into artworks. Placing toothpaste, shoes, or hats in unexpected contexts allowed them to be redefined. This Met exhibition shows commissioned photographs alongside archived catalogues and trade publications, and in so doing reveals how these images influenced the visual vocabulary of modernism and the interwar avant-garde. —Jeanne Malle